Fox News, Paper Tiger

Jack Shafer is POLITICO's senior media writer. Previously, Jack wrote a column about the press and politics for Reuters and before that worked at Slate as a columnist and as the site's deputy editor. He also edited two alternative weeklies, SF Weekly and Washington City Paper. His work has been published in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, the Columbia Journalism Review, Foreign Affairs, The New Republic, BookForum and the op-ed page of The Wall Street Journal.

As early as September 2010, journalists were using the phrase “the Fox Primary” as shorthand to describe the Fox News Channel’s apparent role in selecting the Republican Party’s next presidential nominee. The formulation was not completely fanciful. As reported in Gabriel Sherman’s recent book, The Loudest Voice in the Room, Fox News mastermind Roger Ailes is never shy about his ambition to elect a president. Nor is his ambition an aberration, as other publishers have sought to fill the White House with their candidate. William Randolph Hearst tried to vault himself into the position. Col. Robert M. McCormick of the Chicago Tribune so hated President Franklin D. Roosevelt that he gave editorial support and money to Republican Alf Landon in the 1936 contest, as well as housing 100 Landon campaign workers in the Tribune Tower. Washington Post Publisher Philip L. Graham helped broker the Kennedy-Johnson ticket in 1960.

At the time the phrase was gaining currency, Fox had four potential presidential candidates on its payroll as on-air talent—Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee. (Other wannabes who’ve taken Fox cash include John Kasich and Ben Carson.) Meanwhile, the party’s unpaid aspirants double-parked their limousines outside Fox studios each night in hopes of scoring camera time of their own. According to a September 2010 tally by the Clinton-captive research and agitprop group Media Matters for America, five prospective GOP presidential candidates appeared on Fox 269 times in the first nine months of 2010. The same crew of politicians appeared a total of six times on all the competing networks combined over the same period.

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Fox tickled itself to the point of incontinence at the suggestion that it possessed the power to select presidents, commencing the “ Hannity Primary” in May 2011, a repeating feature in which Sean Hannity interviewed White House applicants on his show. Hysteria struck Media Matters (as it does several times a day) as the organization shrieked, “It’s become increasingly clear that the road to the Republican nomination runs through Fox News.” Hoping to block the road, Media Matters started a weekly feature (“The Fox Primary by the Numbers”) to chart the frequency of the aspirants' appearances on Fox and the elapsed time of their visits.

If the road to the nomination runs through Fox, it must be longer than the Trans-Canada Highway, as the network has yet to nominate a candidate despite its vigorous plumping of the political fortunes of Palin, Gingrich, Santorum and Huckabee and its willingness to serve as a second home for Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Donald Trump, Ron Paul and all the rest. At times, it seemed that neurosurgeon Carson was employed as a contributor almost solely to muse on air about whether he’d run for president. In 2012, the party ultimately turned to the least Foxy candidate in the GOP batch, Mitt Romney, who finished first in 42 Republican primaries in 2012. The next best performer, Fox supplicant Santorum, won just 11.

By any measure, Fox News is a paper tiger. Nevertheless, the myth of the Fox Primary endures—and it returned to prominence as the 2016 race began to heat up. In February, Sherman appeared on CNN’s Reliable Sources to breathe fresh life into the fairy tale. “These candidates are already courting Ailes and trying to get on his good side to get reliable coverage going into the primary season,” Sherman said. Fox News, he noted, “controls the largest bloc of reliable Republican voters.” Sherman cited Rick Perry’s recent ring-kissing visit to Ailes as new proof of Fox’s power. But bowing and puckering comes as a first instinct for most politicians for news outlets as a matter of instinct, so we needn’t dwell too long on its importance. Just this week, Marco Rubio went on Fox to “ preannounce“ his candidacy, which some observers surely took as additional evidence that GOP candidates serve at the network’s pleasure.

I don’t mean to totally discount Fox’s influence. As Sherman pointed out on Reliable Sources, Fox viewership is heavily Republican, and it does vote. But that’s only half the story. The audiences for two of the network’s most popular shows—the ones hosted by Hannity and by Bill O’Reilly—tilt heavily Republican (65 percent and 52 percent, respectively), according to a 2012 Pew survey. But Pew says that 55 percent of the total Fox News audience self-describes as either Democrat or Independent, which means Republicans represent only a plurality of the network’s viewers. Plus, the Fox audience is not that large. O’Reilly, whose show is the most-watched in cable news, attracts an average of only 3 million viewers a night. (The largest audience drawn by him this year was 3.3 million.)

Not exactly sufficient numbers to swing primary elections once the Fox Primary has concluded, are they? In 2012, Romney collected more total primary votes (10 million) than did Santorum (3.9 million), Gingrich (2.7 million) or Paul (2.1 million). An argument could be made that Fox dilutes whatever kingmaking power it might possess by encouraging so many Foxy candidates to run, and they end up splitting the Fox vote, allowing a less-Ailesian figure to win.

If Ailes is so powerful, such a potent kingmaker, why couldn’t he persuade either of his 2012 favorites, Chris Christie and David Petraeus, into the 2012 race? Perhaps the two men know something Ailes doesn’t. Fox seems to be as equally powerless at leveraging its media power to win general elections. The network influence failed to propel John McCain into the White House in 2008. In 2012, the network tried to load the deck for Romney in the last three days of the campaign, broadcasting 168 minutes of Romney campaign speeches compared to just 27 minutes of Barack Obama speeches, according to Media Matters. We all know how well that worked.

As a general rule, the Fox Primary is as safe for the candidates as a flag football game. The network may favor one of its Republican children over the others, but it will most likely never spank any of them—even if they’re naughty. At Fox, the only real punishment is neglect.

None of this is to suggest that Republicans can or should ignore Fox. Undeniably, the channel plays a role in the shape of the GOP debate. Undeniably, it still holds enough sway to inflate a sideline player into a distant contender, as it did with Carson recently. Another measure of its “power” is that it can and will wound politicians who earn its ire, but I can’t think of any time those wounds were ever the sole cause of death for a candidate.

Some January, Ailes might get lucky and wake up to find the victor of the Fox Primary in the White House, but, based on history, his luck will be inversely proportional to the Foxiness of the candidate. Until then, think of the Fox Primary not as a political sausage-works but as Ailes’ version of the greatest show on earth—a 16-month-long extravaganza that helps Fox maintain its dominance in the ratings, fill many a programming hour and sustain its industry-leading profit margin. This election cycle and every election cycle, the only real winner of the Fox Primary is Roger Ailes.